Custom browser does not receive URL at %s

[David Fraser]

I have used the Preferred Applications dialog to set up a custom browser function, so that I can tell firefox to open the URL in a new tab in a particular profile (I always have two firefox instances open with different profiles):
 firefox -P default -remote "openurl(%s, new-tab)"
I can verify this has been set using
 gconftool --get /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command
However, when I try and open a URL it fails. On investigation, running
 gnome-open http://google.com/
runs
 firefox -P default -remote "openurl(, new-tab)" http://google.com/

So basically rather than replacing the %s with the URL, it removes the %s and appends the URL

[David Fraser (davidf)]

This seemed to start after the upgrade to Intrepid

[David Fraser (davidf)]

This also happens with xdg-open, and I'm not sure which calls which...

[David Fraser (davidf)]

Looked in the source and gnome-open just calls the glib g_app_info_launch_default_for_uri function, which I suspect ends up forwarding to g_desktop_app_info_launch_uris which does the actual paremeter expansion, so adding Glib package...

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report, is that still an issue in jaunty or karmic?

[David Fraser (davidf)]

Yes this is still an issue in jaunty, I can reproduce exactly as described above

[David Fraser (davidf)]

Ah, looking at the source, apparently it's meant to have a %u or %U, not a %s.
In that case it gets substituted OK, but with extra 'quotes' which prevents firefox from parsing it OK:
firefox -P default -remote openurl('http://google.com/', new-tab)

[Joel Ebel (jbebel)]

The preferred applications help page says to use %s. Perhaps this is just a documentation bug. I puzzled of this one for a while until I came to the same conclusion.